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Female directors make sex on screen more interesting, Susan Sarandon has claimed, as she sets her sights on making the pornography industry more acceptable to women.

The Oscar-winning actress said that female directors were less embarrassed about exploring the reason people have sex and “what the scene is supposed to tell you about these people”.

Sarandon was speaking at the Cannes Film Festival, which has often been overshadowed by accusations of sexism. There is annual criticism of the low number of female directors, and last year it emerged that festival organisers demanded that women attending red-carpet events had to wear

Nugget porn is not when you send a distant relative down to McDonald’s to pick up a ten-pack to give to an even more distant relative who strategically inserts them inside of you and the not-so-distant relative, all while watching the The Fall Guy. That is something completely different.

ARLINGTON, Va. ? A congressional candidate running for a seat in Virginia appears to have shared a little too much about his browsing habits by posting an embarrassing screenshot to his official Facebook page.

Mike Webb, who is running as an independent after losing the Republican primary, posted several screenshots Monday morning and appears to have included several Yahoo tabs from X-rated sites. Pages with the titles “Ivone Sexy Amateur” and “Layla Rivera Tight” were both open, along with an AT&T bill pay page.

Is that what the American Law Institute means when they say “sex law”? I would have thought it was just laws pertaining to sexual conduct. Some of which are certainly appropriate (though as Florida man points out, it could be covered by a general assault/battery law).

The real take-away from most of these sorts of poll results is that somebody is doing a good job of feeding you misinformation. When everybody says they’re worried about some problem that doesn’t actually personally affect them, it’s a problem that doesn’t affect anybody and yet somehow everybody thinks it affects everybody. If you ask people if they think X is a big problem and then ask them if X is a big problem for them personally, there should be some correlation between the numbers there. I suspect there’s a hell of a lot of this sort of disconnect between perception and reality in people who regularly watch the news and see all the crime and violence and horrible things going on in the world and don’t quite grasp the fact that it’s only on the news because it’s something unusual and not because it’s so commonplace.

Evolutionary psychology is always going to be mostly “just so” stories. But it’s certainly an interesting to think about. I don’t know where that leaves it as an academic discipline. But I don’t think it’s something that people shouldn’t think about, even if you can’t have much scientific certainty about your theories.

That’s true and it always sticks out to me as well. Evolution is just stuff that happens, not a process moving toward some goal or end. I’d even say that saying “evolution selects certain traits” assigns too much agency to evolution. Evolution is the fact that certain traits are associated with more reproductive success and so are more likely to be passed on the subsequent generations.

Well, to be fair, the “reason” the trait evolved appears to be idle speculation on the part of this “scientist”. Speculating as to why something may be so is not a reason and just pulling idea out of your ass is not science. But notice it’s the headline writers who seem to think theories are conclusions.

This article is awful. First of all, it’s a review. Not a study. The primary study cited by the review (as cited in the article) is basically just a self-identification questionnaire asking are you “100% straight, somewhere in the middle or 100% gay.” Women being more open to describing themselves as somewhat fluid is way more likely to be a product of the current social environment than any kind of real evolutionary process.

women have had to evolve to deal with the experience of men having more than one partner.

That seems backwards to me. If one man is servicing more than one woman, its not the women who are lacking for opposite-sex partners, its the (other) men. Assuming, of course, that women don’t also have more than one partner.

Public restrooms ? and, perhaps even more strongly so, locker rooms ? have always operated in the cultural imagination as sites of strict gender roles and compulsive heterosexuality. With the notable exception of Ally McBeal, a ’90s Fox sitcom about a law firm centered upon a unisex bathroom (which, instead of normalizing the concept, arguably made a conservative case for restroom gender segregation), popular culture has long established tropes associated with each restroom. The men’s room is a place for aggressive macho posturing, bullying the weak, and artfully avoiding eye contact; women’s rooms, meanwhile, are hyper-feminine places for girls to get primped, gossip, cry, and avoid boys ? boys who, in turn, fantasize about what goes on behind the closed girls’ room door. A number of ’80s teen movies, from Pretty in Pink to Porky’s to Fame, include scenes (which have inspired countless others) involving guys attempting to see into or enter the girls’ bathroom ? and they either play the attempt for laughs or treat deeply creepy peeping Tom behavior with a cavalier “boys will be boys” shrug. While queer men in bathrooms are a threat, straight men are just guys doing what guys do.

The men’s room is a place for aggressive macho posturing, bullying the weak, and artfully avoiding eye contact; women’s rooms, meanwhile, are hyper-feminine places for girls to get primped, gossip, cry, and avoid boys ? boys who, in turn, fantasize about what goes on behind the closed girls’ room door.

Now I feel kind of bad for only pissing and shitting in them for the last 30 years.

“Most men in Dayton or Huntsville do not lounge around in the morning in their pajamas, with or without built-in footpads, drinking hot chocolate and scanning health-insurance policies. That our elites either think they do, or think the few that matter do, explains why a nation $20 trillion in debt envisions the battle over transgender restrooms as if it were Pearl Harbor.”

The only kind of, sort of, maybe point I can see in there is to ask if the reason for separate bathrooms has anything to do with sex (as in sexual attraction, not biological sex), then the existence of gay people undermines the argument. If the reason not to have men in the ladies room is the potential for sexual funny business, doesn’t the same apply to gay people in the “correct” bathroom?

Have you been struggling to bond with your feline? Well, here’s some good news for you because now you can get closer to your cat by acting like one with this Licki Brush. This innovative solution lets you brush your furry-friend by licking it like a cat would. Your cat will love it!

How does it work? The brush is shaped like a giant tongue that you simply need to put inside your mouth and?you can lick-brush your cat. While it may as well be a joke product, it does have its own website and a Kickstarter campaign coming soon, so it just might be real.

Dog shows goers are a small subset of dog owners. I think dog shows are fun, if you are there to watch. Going through the effort of entering and competing, though, definitely raises your oddness quotient.

Dog show dog owners are dog owners who wish they had a cat. Or a Barbie doll. Mr. Tinkums does not like playing dress-up because he’s a damn dog. He wants to roll around on a dead bloated possum and then fuck it. Quit making him act like a high-rent fancyboy – the other dogs are laughing at him and giving him swirlies and stealing his lunch money every time you turn your back.

Dogs are weird. They’ve evolved with humans for long enough that they instinctively look to humans for food. Stop feeding your dog and it will likely stick around you even more, begging and trying to get you to give it food.

“But the Cat keeps his side of the bargain too. He will kill mice and he will be kind to Babies when he is in the house, just as long as they do not pull his tail too hard. But when he has done that, and between times, and when the moon gets up and night comes, he is the Cat that walks by himself, and all places are alike to him. Then he goes out to the Wet Wild Woods or up the Wet Wild Trees or on the Wet Wild Roofs, waving his wild tail and walking by his wild lone.”

So the exempt salary level was last changed by Congress 20 some years ago…. how can it be changed now without Congress doing it? This isn’t some rule interpretation or safety regulation requiring immediate administrative action, it’s a substantive policy question.

58% favor replacing the ACA with federally funded healthcare system About half would also be OK with keeping the ACA as is Separate question shows that just over half would favor repealing the ACA

PRINCETON, N.J. — Presented with three separate scenarios for the future of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), 58% of U.S. adults favor the idea of replacing the law with a federally funded healthcare system that provides insurance for all Americans. At the same time, Americans are split on the idea of maintaining the ACA as it is, with 48% in favor and 49% opposed. The slight majority, 51%, favor repealing the act.

Laugh but this is EXACTLY the bizarre mindset people have where *free* universal crap is concerned.

Here, you have all these hospitals struggling under budgetary constraints while being at the mercy of bureaucrats. A solution to problems like chronic long wait times, waste, corruption and lack of equipment is…TO BUILD AN EVEN BIGGER HOSPITAL under the exact same system that creates the mess. And just so we’re clear this time it’ll be *different* they call it a SUPER HOSPITAL.

I am convinced a blob with its retarded cis-gendered partner behind the scenes takes these decisions. No human with a functional, non-concussed brain could A) devise such a plan or B) support it.

1. The color gamut of sRGB (the standard color space for modern computer displays) is different from that of ink (CMYK) and paint (Pantone, etc.); each has colors that the others do not.

2. The RGB codes used in web browsers are very coarse. There are only 256 levels of each primary, making for 16,777,216 colors, which seems like a lot until the one you want isn’t among them.

3. Due to the great variation in backlighting and LCD/LED quality, the color that appears on your monitor at a certain RGB code will look different from the ink or paint that’s mixed to match it, unless you are viewing both in very controlled environments (e.g. not your home computer and not the paint counter at Walmart)

“We asked Mr Google about how to catch roosters and he came up with the idea to give them a bit of whiskey. Our animal control officer sacrificed some of his own finest Kentucky whiskey and we have laced some barley with it and we are getting results,” he said.

The roosters were getting very drunk and rolling onto their sides, allowing the officers to pick them up.

“Some of them are going to a heavenly home but others have been re-homed in a more rural area. We have one remaining rebel rooster getting a liking for Kentucky whiskey but I am confident we will catch him,” the mayor said.

Stock markets in Europe and Asia weakened on Wednesday in the wake of accelerating U.S. inflation and comments from Federal Reserve officials that rekindled prospects of an interest rate rise within months.

The dollar .DXY, hammered by a virtual abandoning since February of expectations for near-term hikes, hit three-week highs EUR= after comments by Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockhart played up the chances of a move by September.

But the assumed shift toward more tightening was bad news for stock markets, which have been comforted by the idea there would be no squeeze on the funds and companies that have borrowed and invested trillions of dollars globally over the past decade.

What follows is the longest moral high ground fallacy I’ve read in a while

It is not a good goal, it is not a reasonable goal, and it is not an equitable goal. In fact, treating the conversation like a goal is offensive to thinking people who have been having these conversations longer than you or your daddy or your grandfather have been alive, let alone the people forced to live as the subjects of your well-meaning conversations.It is offensive for you to ask me to repeat myself, and depending on how that conversation goes ? you know, the one I didn’t ask to have ? it is even more offensive that whatever pain I associate with the subject be served up like this week’s food for thought.

Not to mention that most of you are horrible conversationalists. You come to the dialogue with tons of cultural determinist baggage. You assume the expanse of my knowledge based on a profile picture. You stereotype.

You only think about racism when the issue makes you boil over here and there, while I have to contend with it ? think, deal, confront, navigate, process, argue about, swallow it ? all of the time.

You have the luxury of not having to concern yourself with the worst parts of racism entirely, and the uncomfortable parts only as long as you wish to stay in the room. The minute you step outside reality bends to your values, protects your body, distracts you from your sins. Considering the topic of conversation, you don’t have a lot of skin in the game.

By most appearances, Hillary is in good shape for November. She has a grasp of policy and familiarity with the ship of state that will create a startling contrast with her opponent in their debates. Trump has a long way to go in fund-raising. His lack of impulse control shows few signs of being remedied. The list goes on for longer than any of us has time to complete. Still, Clinton’s fight in the primaries has caused her to take some positions that she’d prefer to avoid in the general election, and those on immigration may be costliest.

Everyone knows that Trump has staked out extreme turf on border control, promising a wall and a deportation force. But Clinton has gone far in the opposite direction. “I would not deport children,” she said at a debate in March, after proposing the exact opposite in late 2014. “I do not want to deport family members, either.” In short, under Clinton’s policy, if you manage to sneak across the border illegally and make it into a city, you won’t be removed. You could call that open borders, except it’s messier. It’s more like a free-for-all.

Caracas (AFP) – Public outrage over sweeping new emergency powers decreed this week by President Nicolas Maduro was expected to spill over onto the streets of Venezuela Wednesday, with nationwide protests planned.

The demonstrations mark the strongest challenge yet to Maduro’s controversial declaration of a state of emergency.

Opposition-led marches in the capital Caracas and other major cities were to demand that authorities accept a recall referendum to determine Maduro’s fate.

The 53-year-old president on Tuesday dismissed the push against him as “not viable” and said a petition it was based on was riddled with “fraud,” despite 1.8 million signatures seeking his ouster.

The 60-day state of emergency was imposed beginning Monday to tackle what Maduro said were threats to security, as well as food and energy shortages.

Many of the measures rely on Venezuela’s army and police being deployed to carry them out.

It’s been barely 25 years since the Soviet Union fell, and we’re having to fight against Bernie and his cult who are spreading outright lies about the benevolence of socialism, democratic or otherwise.

Which is why we’re having to fight against Bernie. For his young supporters the USSR isn’t even a memory, just something from the history books. You’d pretty much have to be forty or over, ie at least a middle-teenager at the time of the fall of the USSR to have any contemporary memories of Soviet life, even as relayed by news reports and books such as Hedrick Smith’s excellent “The Russians”.

The real estate mogul is the only candidate left in the race, so each contest brings him closer to officially securing the party’s nomination.

His victory in Oregon will give him another 17 delegates to add to his coffers, which brings him to 1,160, according to Associated Press estimates. That’s just 77 delegates shy of the 1,237 threshold, which he will almost assuredly eclipse during the final round of primaries on June 7.

As the only active candidate in the GOP, Trump is all but a lock to win the 347 delegates yet to be awarded, meaning he’ll end the race with more than 1,400 delegates.

Right now they’re animated by his recklessness and cavalier attitude. Once Trump shifts into a lower gear for the long haul, they’ll get bored and change the channel. He’s not going to animate anyone when he’s down in the trenches talking tax policy.

But what were the overnights? That’s what’s important. Pay no attention to the fact that Donald gets more press by attacking the press and the press gets more viewers by reporting Donald’s attacks on the press and the whole thing’s as staged and planned and promoted and sold as a WWE cage match. If they really hated each other, Donald would stop talking to the press and the press would stop talking about him. Donald’s the highly-paid professional sadist to the press’ highly-paid professional masochist and they’re both exhibitionists with rape fantasies getting their rocks off pretending this ain’t a live sex show we’re not only watching but paying dearly for.

Mr. M?ller says the main reason people are leaving Syria “isn’t the crippling violence in the country,” the HuffPo reports. “The number one reason why people leave Syria is not the bombs or the food or the cold, it’s because they want to find educational opportunities for their children,” he explains.

This would mean that most of the Syrian migrants would fall under the category of “economic migrants” rather than “refugees” ? a point that Mr. M?ller even clarifies later in the interview. He says: “To put it very bluntly, every refugee is a migrant. Not every migrant is a refugee. It’s quite clear actually.”

When Trudeau wanted to increase welfare state spending by creating a big new entitlement for families with children, he put it in the budget, and within months checks are going to start going out…If Trudeau wants a child benefit, it’s law.

Similarly, the UK now has a soda tax more or less because Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne got up one day and said, “There should be a soda tax,” and so it became.

By contrast, in the US, for something to become law it has to make its way through committee markup in the House, and pass the full House, and get marked up in the Senate, and pass the Senate, and arrive at a compromise version in conference committee, and have the conference report pass the House, and have the conference report pass the Senate, and have the president sign it.

[snip]

A more utopian idea would be to simply junk the Constitution, the way we junked the Articles of Confederation, and write a new one from scratch. Perhaps some speaker could declare the House sovereign, order the Senate and presidency dissolved, and write up a new constitution abolishing the Senate and presidency entirely and establishing the speaker of the House as head of government. If Paul Ryan is looking for ideas on how to handle a Donald Trump victory, he could do worse than this.

No, libertarians are children. Libertarians think the rules don’t apply to them, just like teenagers. Like teenagers rebelling against their parents who establish good rules for good reasons, libertarians are rebelling against their government that establishes good rules for good reason. There have to be rules. That’s a given. And rules must come from government. Where else can they come from? So libertarians are nothing but immature, naive, rebellious teenagers. They are to be ignored.

That wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen leftists express contempt for the checks and balances, and separation of powers. After all, they prevent the government from getting things done. And since absolutely nothing in this world can happen without government involvement, restraining government only harms society.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the American dream is to be locked up and free to imagine being free. Freedom is nice to dream about, but it’s too much work to really be free. Being a slave means knowing it’s not my fault and somebody else needs to fix it. I don’t care if the slavemaster beats me as long as I have the comfort of knowing I’m a slave and not responsible for what happens to me. Being free means if it needs fixing, I’m the one that’s gotta fix it. Being free means taking responsibility for the consequences of my actions – and nobody wants that. I don’t care who’s imposing his will on me, as long as he’s got a plan I don’t need to think of a plan and if the plan don’t work – not my fault. Not my fault I’m a fat stupid lazy loser – somebody else’s job to make sure I’m not a fat stupid lazy loser.

Looking at the progression from Nixon to Clinton to Bush to Obama, it’s hard to deny the conclusion that the American people want nothing more than to be handcuffed to the bedposts and fucked up the ass while squealing “we hate getting handcuffed to the bedposts and fucked up the ass!”. Both Hillary and Trump know this and both know they can give the American people just what they really want. We’ll see – but if the LP had a lick of sense they’d stop trying to sell this “freedom” shit nobody wants and recruit Ron Jeremy to run for President. “Ron Jeremy. C’mon – you know you want it.”

A gross monthly average income of a Sri Lankan is around 8839 rupees. So the operator, though not living on Jay Z levels of subsistence, is faring better than most of her neighbors. For thousands of her fellow laborers, a Beyonc? job offers a higher salary than the one they’d have to live with if she weren’t ridiculously famous.

This has generally been the case when it comes to “sweatshops” around the world. You may not be old enough to remember the 1996 teary-eyed apology Kathie Lee Gifford offered the nation after lending her name to a Wal-Mart clothing line produced in Honduran sweatshops that also employed underage workers. At the time, the average apparel worker earned $13 per day in the Central American nation, while 44 percent of the population was surviving on less than two dollar a day. Yet, after being confronted, Gifford atoned for her sins by promising to warn America about the misery of foreign factory work.

“Oh, so you oppose giving poor foreign kids the money they need to survive?? You want poor foreign kids to DIE ON THE STREETS?! You MONSTER!!”

They usually counter with some idea that money to kids is good, but having them work for it is bad. To which I counter that I don’t see them donating the money they would’ve spent on foreign-made pants to the third world. Instead they are spending more money to help enrich the American middle class.

It’s odd. For many kids in the third world, they are stuck between a rock and a hard place. They can either starve or work. This situation is bad, sure, but the typical “solution” that wealthy westerners have to this problem is to take away the “work” option. In short, anti-sweatshop people just want kids to starve so that they aren’t directly doing anything that offends their sensibilities. They’d rather a kid starve then know that a kid worked to make a product they use.

Starting Jan. 1, the measure will change the way permanent pension-benefit increases are paid to retirees. Supporters say Prop. 124 over the next 30 years will save $1.5 billion for the retirement trust for first responders.

Prop. 124 will link retirees’ pension cost-of-living adjustments to the regional Consumer Price Index, with an annual cap of 2 percent. An annual 4 percent compounded increase has been paid out to retirees for the past two decades, significantly cutting into the amount of money remaining to pay future retirement benefits.

Although the measure will reduce pension benefits, first responders urged voters to back the plan in order to provide sustainability to a trust that has about half of the money needed to fund current and future pensions. The rising cost for public employers contributing to the PSPRS has caused some communities to curtail the hiring of additional police officers and firefighters.

The proposition was seen as a compromise after Lesko spent a year working with members and employers in the PSPRS. Opponents such as the Arizona Tax Research Association and the Goldwater Institute, which opposed having the proposition placed before voters, said the measure provides no short-term financial relief for taxpayers.

Actress Blake Lively added yet another entry to her long list of being passively racist in a recent Instagram post, in which she stated that she has an “L.A. face with an Oakland booty.”

The post, which was uploaded on May 17, features a split-screen photo of the actress, with one half showcasing her front, and the other her, well, back. The caption references the Bay Area city of Oakland, which has a traditionally sizable POC population.

While Lively’s caption is most likely a nod to Sir Mix-A-Lot’s bar-mitzvah staple “Baby Got Back,” which includes lyrics that match Lively’s caption, it’s still problematic. In the end, it touts a diametrical opposition: that Los Angeles can be equated to elegance and/or beauty (read: whiteness), and that Oakland is its foil (read: blackness).

DHAKA (Reuters) – Weeks after suspected Islamist militants hacked Bangladesh’s most prominent gay rights activist to death in his apartment along with an associate, another friend received a chilling message that he was next in line.

“Say your prayers, confess to God for your sins. Eat or drink whatever you wish to, nobody can save you,” read the handwritten letter, delivered to his home in Dhaka.

Bangladesh’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community was already marginalized in a country where same-sex sexual activity is illegal and many people strongly disapprove.

Now it has been pushed further into the shadows after Xulhaz Mannan, editor of the country’s first LGBT-themed magazine, and Mahbub Rabbi Tonoy were murdered in the capital on April 25.

The attack, claimed by the regional arm of al Qaeda, was the first of its kind to target the community, although it followed similar killings in the last 16 months of university professors, bloggers and atheists who published views critical of Islam.

And will more than likely rely on the welfare state to make their move to a high cost of living environment even remotely feasible, thereby artificially depreciating the value of all low skill labor in the market.

I wouldn’t mind setting aside some of the money ICE uses for other things to help people who are actually oppressed move to more Western places and get a basic education (English, GED). I’d rather the funding be cut entirely, but if they have to spend it, at least it goes to people who really do need to live here to survive.

I care not a fig for women voters. I’m less than impressed with their track record of getting the vote and then within twenty years constructing a welfare state and pulling their electorates leftwards. I get that they’re a power bloc in the electorate, but pandering to women voters hasn’t done liberty any favors.

Well the fact that women voters tend not to vote for liberty and women tend not to be libertarians is not the fault of libertarianism, I guess is my point. The fault rests squarely with feminism and female voters generally prioritizing financial security over liberty, at someone else’s expense.

It’s hard to read that article and not come away with the conclusion that voting is nothing but base tribalism now. Sure, I always knew it played a role, even a large one. But if what Williamson is citing is true, rational self-interest and logical thought in politics simply doesn’t exist.

Good for him, pointing out that there are gender and race gaps running both directions. It drives me nuts that the only “gender gap” the DemOp media ever talks about is the female one running against Repubs, and not the male one running against Dems.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the headspace of this film, digging out the pieces of myself that I thought I saw. There’s a lot to dissect if you look past all the razzle-dazzle. But here is the secret, 30 years after Top Gun first buzzed the tower: The most important scene in the film is not the immortal “need for speed” double high-five, or Tom Cruise frenching his way to heterosexuality in blue silhouette to “Take My Breath Away,” or even Iceman ambiguously inviting Maverick to be his wingman any time.

The most important moment in Top Gun is when Maverick cries. Goose dies instantly when their plane goes down in the ocean, hitting his head on the canopy of the jet. Maverick feels the sting of that loss and keeps up a stony facade in front of his superiors, but he breaks down when he has to face Carole and apologize. She tells him that Goose loved flying with him, and he would have flown with anyone, but he would have hated it. He loved Maverick.

This is what wakes him up: not the loss of face in front of his classmates, not the military failure, but the love he took for granted while trying to be someone he wasn’t.

Posted this last night on another thread, but in case people missed it……Volokh on NYC’s insane gender pronoun edict:

“And this isn’t just the government as employer, requiring its employees to say things that keep government patrons happy with government services. This is the government as sovereign, threatening “civil penalties up to $125,000 for violations, and up to $250,000 for violations that are the result of willful, wanton, or malicious conduct” if people don’t speak the way the government tells them to speak. …….The federal government is taking the view that existing federal bans on sex discrimination also in effect ban gender identity discrimination, and the New York analysis would equally apply to that view; and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has already taken the view that it is illegal under federal law to persistently call employees by pronouns that correspond to their anatomical sex but not their gender identity, though it has not yet had occasion to opine about “ze.”

The entire thing is nothing but a tool for government control of the language and by extension people’s thought. And yet, self styled libertarians like Scott Shackelford and Robby Soave think it is just wonderful that the government is going to make sure trans people’s delicate feelings are not hurt.

The Megyn Kelly interview with Donald Trump that aired last night was kind of a snooze.

Megyn Kelly was too busy sucking her own dick over what a great journalist she thinks she is.

Libertarian Party presidential hopeful Gary Johnson is making the comedy podcast circuit this week, talking to Adam Carolla and Joe Rogan:

I’d be careful talking to Joe Rogan. He’s a two-face and doesn’t really understand very much. He’ll pretend to be 100% on board with his guests views, then the next show he’ll have on a guy with the opposite views and he’ll again pretend to be 100% on board and talking shit about the previous guest. I’ve seen him do that with a libertarian guest one night, and then a socialist on the next show and each time he claims to completely agree with mutually exclusive views. If he had Bernie Sanders on tonight, I’m certain that he would profess a love for Bernie’s socialism regardless of whatever he said to Gary last night.

He’s more knowledgeable about his drug intake than any abstract concepts, but pretends that his drug intake offers him insight to abstract concepts.

Dude, you’re going about this negging thing all wrong. Maybe going back to calling her a whore and claiming she and all successful women must have slept their way to the top will work out better for you.

In fairness to John, she *is* a shitty newsperson. In fairness to Kelly, everybody on Fox is a shitty newsperson. Their regular “hard” news coverage is atrocious. I hate CNN, but they’re still the best on cable when it comes to breaking news and reporting.

It is not even that she is that bad. She is a newsreader who gets paid to look hot. That is honest work and plenty nice if you can get it. The problem is she actually thinks she is smart enough to deserve giving her opinions some kind of special credence. She really seems to believe that she would be where she is if she didn’t look like she does. That is what makes her so annoying.

Earlier this month, Thomas pleaded guilty to huffing compressed air while on the job.

Huffing can give someone a temporary high.

Thomas was sentenced to 12 months probation and community service.

That’s the entire news article. Now, as far as I know, “huffing” is breathing stuff that displaces oxygen, cuts off the oxygen supply to the brain – you can get the same effect, albeit in a slower-acting form, simply by putting a plastic bag over your head. So how exactly does one “huff” compressed air? Surely you can’t shoot pressurized air directly into your lungs so you’d have to decompress the compressed air first – and isn’t huffing decompressed compressed air otherwise known as “breathing”? Anybody know what the hell this is all about? It sure sounds to me like a pack of retards – the chief for thinking he could get high breathing air and the supervisors for thinking the chief actually was getting high by breathing air.

They mean the “canned air” spray dusters, which use any of a variety of fluorocarbons compressed into liquid form. They actually do sell air dusters that use literal compressed air, but obviously you can’t get high off that.

Ah, okay. So huffing Freon. I had an image of him sidling up to a gas station, looking around nervously as he sticks some quarters in the air machine, and then running off a big ol’ garbage bag full of air he could take around back and bury his face in. The fact that he was a police chief made it entirely plausible that he would think this would work.

I suppose my interview went fairly well – but I don’t think I will take any offer they give me:

Plant Manager – who looked to be an ex-marine type – had that look of religious zeal in his eyes as he started talking about the joys of lean manufacturing and fostering the correct “corporate culture”. Most of the lean guys I know think they can design a foolproof system – usually consisting of a big board of tags – for the employees. But those systems just add more overhead and complexity. I believe that personal responsibility is the best way to promote quality and production: reward those who perform, remove those who do not.

Anyway – the guy I would report to was also a bit of a nut case, hitting me up with a bunch of very specific questions about the ERP package they use, some areas not in my area of expertise. That was fine, but when he started asking about data table details and the best indexes to use, I could only reply that I look at the book of database definitions to determine that information and memorizing the hundreds of tables is worthless considering the information is right by my elbow. He is also from India and I had a hard time understanding him, especially when he tried to get technical since his command of the language started to break down a little there. He also had all the personality of a wet rag with a fixed smile that was a bit unnerving. Maybe he was nervous too but I had the urge to punch him in the throat by the time we were done.

What’s the point of having been in the Marines if you’re not going to brag about it for the rest of your life? You’re voluntarily choosing the most miserable of the services, you might as well get SOMETHING out of the deal.

Listen, you woke up early in the morning, watched a few guys poop, ran around in the mud for awhile, and became a fairly proficient shooter. Then you went to Japan and got freaky. Then you went to Thailand and got freakier. We get it. It’s cool.

Did anyone else see Susan Sarandon claim a) Thelma and Louise would never be made today because movie executives are sexists (more so than in the early ’90s?) and b) there aren’t enough female protagonists because men can’t identify with women?

The thing about executive sexism is absurd. The reason Thelma and Louise wouldn’t get made today is because those small scale movies don’t get made – studios are too busy making the next big budget sequel or superhero movie.

So no, you couldn’t make a small scale movie about female outlaws driving around, but you could make a movie about female superheroes blowing up buildings.

Here’s the thing about the “grrrl power” brand of blockbuster feminism: anyone who’s really interested in seeing feminine leads should be insulted by their portrayal. They’re effigies of women embodying masculine traits like bodily strength and emotional detachment. Furiosa was a likable character the way Vasquez from Aliens was likable: butch and angry and brooking no nonsense. I haven’t seen TFA, but after listening to a few podcasters deconstruct the movie, it sounds like Rey cakewalked into all her powers, exhibiting in a few hours an expertise over the arts it took Luke three movies to master. Fury Road doesn’t capture anything especially feminine about its female lead, and by the sound of it, TFA gave its lead all the cheat codes. They’re women playacting the traditional male leads feminists claim to hate. If there’s any lesson to learn from these movies, it’s that women should be more like men.

Sarandon may be right, Thelma and Louise probably would not be made today. That’s not because movie execs are horrible bastards, it’s because the market for feminist movies is in taking successful male-dominated franchises and casting female leads.

Maybe we’ve got feminists all wrong when they say they want better representation in Hollywood. Maybe they mean exactly that. They just want to see more female leads, whether or not they bring any actual femininity to the roles. They literally just want to see more tits on the screen. In which case, I must be a feminist.

^ Great point. There was a garbage Robin Hood movie directed by Ridley Scott with Russell Crowe in it. At the end, Maid Marian *rode into combat in battle armor.*

It was one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever seen. It was such an obvious attempt to be super, duper feminist, but it takes you out of the movie because a farm girl (which is what Maid Marian was in that movie) would never be riding into combat in medieval England.

Completely agree on TFA (not good, btw). Fury Road presents a very complex character in Furiosa that I found very intriguing. Sure she has numerous physical traits and behaviors you would stereotypically associate with a male lead (haircut, mechanical arm, marksmanship/driving skills, etc.) but it’s all part of contrasting with the traditional femininity she is trying to rescue (itself a “male” objective) and, ultimately, is trying to return to herself (the mothers). When she realizes there’s nothing to return to, she makes the conscious decision to take over the horrific, male-dominated society of Immortan Joe and improve it through a combination of “male” and “female” traits.

I liked Fury Road quite a bit for exactly those reasons (that’s a great breakdown, by the way). Afterward I wondered how the hell, short of never having seen it, idiot PUAs and their fellow travelers had mistaken the movie for feminist agitprop. Furiosa is distinctly and categorically not a feminist icon, although many feminists no doubt fancy themselves to be as hardbitten and cynical. She’s a brother-in-arms to Max’s character, having cast off her femininity as a luxury and encumbrance to achieving the goals she desires. She embraces unemotional, goal-driven brutality. The “authentically” (or maybe more recognizably) feminine characters are laudable for taking the risks they do to buck their slavery, but ultimately they must rely on the dwindling cast of masculine characters to achieve freedom. The movie was a much more nuanced depiction of gender relations than feminists generally allow because it embraced and elevated gender distinctions rather than blurring or burying them.

“If I probably didn’t have tattoos, or if I probably didn’t bleach my hair, or if I probably didn’t wear blue jeans and a T-shirt to fancy things, if I didn’t do things that make me look like someone who’s whacked out of their mind, it’d probably be different. But then again, that’s how I wanna dress. And I like my tattoos. And I like my hair cut the way it is,” he said.

I don’t quite understand what about him warrants hate rather than just turning the channel.

Probably his existence is a huge middle finger to the “I only eat organically grown artisanal fair trade vegan crap and everyone else should too. And anyone who disagrees with my dietary choices should be thrown into an active volcano” hipster douchnozzles. You know, the kind of people who think anyone who doesn’t live within easy biking distance of a Whole Foods is in a “food desert” regardless of how many other food choices they have.

His main show is way better than most of the crap on the food network now. He actually shows me food that I think I’d like at places I think I’d want to go.

I’d much rather watch that than a wanna-be-Bravo reality show competition shit that has taken over most of the network. Not every fucking show needs a dramatic pause where somebody gets “voted off the island”, you fucking assholes.

Latvia followed the exact opposite of the Krugman-Keynesian prescription. The nation maintained its currency peg and cut government spending instead of increasing it. The medicine worked: with broad public support, Latvia abolished half of its government agencies and cut the state workforce by 30 percent, according to ?slund and Dombrovskis. Coupled with regulatory and education reform, this downsizing galvanized the private sector and brought the country roaring back.

I know it’s what they think. They hate economic growth because the gains are not distributed fairly. They would rather be equally poor than unequally rich. And in either situation they will complain, blame capitalism, and want more government to fix it.

Meet today’s candidate for worst human being alive. A one Michael Crook

We all thought it was a wonderful thing that Mao was launching,” Mr Crook, now 64, told the Telegraph, in his first interview with a British newspaper. “It would guarantee that China would take the socialist road.”

While mistakes had been made during the Mao period, he argued, the free-market economics on which China has since prospered had led to just as much upheaval, creating a “tremendous imbalance” between rich and poor. “Letting greed drive development ? well that certainly does bring about development ? but it also brings about polarisation, so what price social harmony?” he said.

in 2005, a biography was published called Mao The Unknown Story. It relied on Chinese sources and notes and letters and interviews with people who had actually known him. It portrayed him as a complete sociopath and a mad man. The book got great reviews and sold well. It was however panned by the academic community of China specialists. According to them the book was too harsh on Mao and relied on too much circumstantial evidence.

That is right, the academics just couldn’t handle a book that said Mao was a lunatic.

I heard a bit on NPR about Mao. They were saying that the general consensus in China, at least the one put forth by the government, is that while his policies were disastrous, his intentions were pure. He was really a good guy. Really. It wasn’t his fault that millions died under his rule, because good intentions and all of that.

Any mention of Mao always reminds me of an awesome anti-communist world history teacher I had in high school who showed us the movie “To Live”, which was banned from mainland China for being critical of the communist government (I.e being realistic) if he still shows that movie today, I imagine he also has to provide safe spaces

Just days after the U.S. and NATO moved forward on a missile defense program in Europe, Russia responded by vowing to modernize a launch detection system alerting Moscow to potential attacks, Russian media reported Tuesday.

The Dnepr Missile Launch Detection System is located in Crimea, which Russia took over from Ukraine in 2014. Once upgraded, it would be able to detect hypersonic, ballistic and cruise missiles from the Mediterranean and Black Seas, Pravda reported.

Moscow had cried foul over the NATO program, even though U.S. officials said it would fend off missile threats from Iran. “The threat is gone, but the creation of the missile defense system is continuing,” President Vladimir Putin said Friday.

The NATO system includes a site in Romania that became operational Thursday and a site in northern Poland where U.S. and Polish officials broke ground Friday for a facility due to be ready in 2018.

Congressman: Classified details of Iran’s treatment of US sailors will shock nation

The classified details behind Iran’s treatment of several U.S. sailors who were captured by the Islamic Republic during a tense standoff earlier this year are likely to shock the nation, according to one member of the House Armed Services Committee, who disclosed to the Washington Free Beacon that these details are currently being withheld by the Obama administration.

Rep. Randy Forbes (R., Va.) told the Free Beacon in an interview that the Obama administration is still keeping details of the maritime incident under wraps. It could be a year or longer before the American public receives a full accounting of the incident, in which several U.S. sailors were abducted at gunpoint by the Iranian military.

“I’ve had a full classified briefing” from military officials, Forbes told the Free Beacon. “It could be as long as a year before we actually get that released.”

Oh boo hoo. The poor little sailors entered foreign waters without permission and were taken at gunpoint. I’m sure we wouldn’t kindly treat Russian sailors if a warship started poking around our shores. And I don’t think we should be expected to treat them kindly.

European Union members plotted secretly in March to have African dictators, including accused war criminal and Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, help stem the tide of refugees pouring into Europe, according to an explosive report in the German publication Der Spiegel.

An “action plan” discussed at the March 23 meeting led by Germany, included earmarking $45 million to al-Bashir’s Sudan and seven other African countries to intercept and take in refugees bound for the west, according to the report.

“Under no circumstances” was the public to learn of the talks, ambassadors of the 28 European Union member states agreed. A staff member of EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Federica Mogherini warned that Europe’s reputation could be in jeopardy if word of the talks leaked, according to the report.

Yeah, socialism works great until you run out of other people’s money to steal. Then you’re fucked. The problem if we ever go full socialist is that it will take a long time to run out of other people’s money. By the time we do, it may be that people will be so accustomed to it that no one will be around who can remember that there’s any alternative.

Wait…is your argument that because Venezuela isn’t as bad off as *Colombia* we shouldn’t criticize Venezuela?

South Africa’s not as bad as Syria right now, so clearly if I criticized the problems South Africa has with baby rape the proper response would be to say ‘well, they’re better than Syria, so don’t criticize them!’

And Venezuela has an extraordinary amount of oil money, which Colombia doesn’t have. Strange how you use 3 year old data (data from before Venezuela’s economic collapse) and compare the GDP of a nation sitting on the world’s largest oil reserves to a country with far fewer natural resources.

No, I’m saying that Venezuela and Colombia are relatively poor countries in South America and that it is difficult to impossible to learn anything from their experience when looking at whether we should dismantle the Social Security Administration.

Did anyone argue that Venezuela’s collapse provided evidence that we should dismantle social security? It provides evidence that nationalization of industry and extreme government intervention in the economy has a negative impact. Moreover, the fact that libertarians and conservatives *predicted this* should show you that socialism is clearly a failed economic system since it’s so easy to look at a socialist country and immediately know it’s going to implode.

Why don’t you compare Venezuela to Chile instead of a fucked up narco state like Colombia? That should provide a simple explanation of the difference between capitalism and socialism.

Ricardo Hausmann, a Venezuelan, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and director of the Harvard Center for International Development, says that those inside and out of Caracas claim that the nation is headed for collapse.

“Venezuela’s problems are a consequence of the craziest economic policy ever in a country or in the world,” he says. “It’s a country that has gone through its longest and highest oil boom in its history, and ended that period over-indebted, with a destroyed productive capacity, and now it cannot face the reduction in the price of oil.”

“[Venezuela] has no access to international financial markets to borrow, it has no reserves left. It has a crazy system of controls that has led to rationing, and shortages and long lines,” says Hausmann.

The Venezuelan healthcare system is also in a state of extreme turmoil. Infants are dying at an alarming rate, fundamental drugs are not imported and hospitals and doctors are reporting that they have no gloves, water or soap to perform basic procedures.

“The country is now living its worst year from an economic and a social point of view, and [there’s] a humanitarian crisis that is being hidden away by a lack of information,” Hausmann says.

There was an article on Reason about this where they pointed out that Venezuelan exports were 75% oil in the ’80s and are 96% oil today. That means the entire Venezuelan economy is basically being propped up by oil money because they have nothing else.

They’d be far poorer than Colombia if it weren’t for that oil money. Oil money lets you get away with dumb economic policies for longer than you’d otherwise be able to.

NYPD live streams bulldozers crushing a parking lot full of ‘illegal motorcycles, atvs, and scooters’.

What? What the fuck?

From the facebook link:

Can someone explain why they need to be destroyed? (Instead of being donated/given to charity in a state where they are legal.)

City of New York Government Hi, Terrell. Thank you for your question — you and several others have flagged this. We checked with NYPD and here’s what we can tell you. These vehicles are illegal in the City of New York. We are committed to making the streets of our city completely safe. That means leaving no opportunity for these things to find their way back to our roads and further endanger our fellow New Yorkers. This is the same reason we destroy the guns we confiscate. The metal from these vehicles is recycled after they are crushed. –scott

These vehicles are illegal in the City of New York. We are committed to making the streets of our city completely safe. That means leaving no opportunity for these things to find their way back to our roads and further endanger our fellow New Yorkers. This is the same reason we destroy the guns we confiscate. The metal from these vehicles is recycled after they are crushed. –scott

Feeling that his time in the House was coming to an end (because of elements of boredom, restlessness, and his unwillingness to face the indignity of other challenges to his leadership position and House seat)

Yeah, he foresaw that the Republican Party was going to become a shit show of religious extremists, Randians, assholes, bigots, homophobes, and militarists. So he left. I say that’s a credit to him, no?

A 72-year-old man in Australia has been released from hospital after battling multiple crocodiles with spanners (or wrenches as they’re known in the U.S.) and spark plugs. The man and his friend were crabbing while on vacation near Darwin in the North Territory. The two retirees were leaning over the edge of their boat to pull up their crab pots when a saltwater crocodile nudged their boat and capsized it.

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I’m so glad the citizens of DC are not allowed to have guns. Otherwise law abiding citizens would be allowed to defend themselves. This way, more violent criminals are allowed to create more victims of violent crime and not worry about being shot. Now I can sleep better at night.

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